That is hilarious! Also, enjoy. I DID read A WRINKLE IN TIME- repeatedly- and loved it every time. As well as the subsequent three (yes, three. She wrote a fourth novel featuring the twins years after A SWIFTLY TILTING PLANET).

If you like it, keep reading. A SWIFTLY TILTING PLANET was my favorite. Not only of the series, but among my most beloved childhood books.

Also, for the record, I wanted to be just like Meg's mom. Cooking on a bunsen burner and holding two PhDs. In retrospect, that is another thing to love about those books. A mother who is a brilliant scientist was pretty groundbreaking for the era.

Did you read one of the other books in the series? MANY WATERS is my favorite; the poor shattered remains of that book still sit on my parent's bookshelf (I was sort of afraid to move it to put it on my own shelf...) Same author, some of the same characters, same brilliant writing.

It must be years of working in the kids department at B&N...but I'm with Ali and wanna know what the plot was, what the cover looked like (because, regardless of the mysterious 'book with a blue cover' I once found Palahniuk's Haunted just from a customer saying "ghostly" so it can be done!), and if you remember the MC's name/description at all. We CAN find this thing!

You make me feel better. I was the only one in my book club who hadn't read this. I've bought it, too. And several of the other book club folks hadn't read The Yearling or Old Yeller. Deprived souls.It will be fun to hear what you did read.

I read A Wrinkle in Time in Grade 5. And started on the sequel...A Wind in the Door (?). And then my uncle bought me the brand new hardback (I NEVER had hardbacks!) of A Swiftly Tilting Planet, but I could never get through the second book to reach it! I don't think I ever did finish or read STP. The thought of owning such a beautiful hardcover and not being able to read it haunted me for years! It's funny, but I think the only other hard backbook I ever owned was Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume because it was on sale. Funny the things you remember! Hardbacks belonged to the library in my brain...you had to be rich to OWN one! I put WIT on hold at the library...there are 6 copies, and 8 holds. Now that's a classic!

I always got a WiT vibe from Piers Anthony's Mode series (I think it starts with Virtual Mode), but I'm not sure.

Hey, if that offer of finding a book you read as a kid is open to anyone, I read a book in fourth or fifth grade (would have been an upper elementary book at least in '87 0r '88, though it could have been pubbed a lot earlier), about a house built literally over a river, and a young boy went there only to find the place crawling with homicidal little clockwork automatons. I would have sworn it had River and House in the title, but I may be wrong. any ideas?

I don't know what you read, but those books are timeless. I read A WRINKLE IN TIME to my older son a few years ago, and he loved it and went on to read the whole series, and now I just finished reading it to my younger son. Except not really, because by the time I was halfway through he was too impatient to wait for me to finish, so he read the rest himself.

I wonder if you might be thinking of something by Andre Norton or Ursula K Le Guin? Together with Madeleine L'Engle, those three pretty much owned the field of highly imaginative SF/Fantasy kids books, all writing at about the same time. I'd totally recommend the first three of Le Guin's Earthsea stories. Andre Norton's Witchworld books were very popular, but I thought her kids' SF books were better.

maybe it was A Handful of Time, by Kit Pearson? It's about a girl who finds a stopwatch in an old family cottage and goes back in time to when her mom was her age. For some reason, until now I've always thought it was what everyone was talking about when they mentioned a wrinkle in time

Gosh, Janet, that's kind of heartbreaking. I read this book many times as a child and would never forget it. But reading it as an adult it DID feel like another book and I didn't like it as much. Still LOVE A Swiftly Tilting Planet though.

I've done that. Just recently I bought a copy of Catch-21, all excited about catching up with Yossarian and the boys...boy was I disappointed when I started reading and learned that it was a guide on playing blackjack and not the classic satire. hehehe

My brother always had a problem putting the correct record (plastic thingies, nevermind) in the right jacket. When I listened to them, I inevitably got the name wrong. I thought that Muddy Waters was a saxophone player and loved the guitar work of Coltrane. Ah to be 10 again.

Very little. Mostly i just remember it being the first "dark" book I'd read. It had a really sinister feel. All of the things I remember are really foggy and subject to serious wrongness, but here goes:

The boy was around ten, and he may have just moved to the area, or been visiting relatives (I almost want to say he was visiting relatives, but not with his parents). Near where he lived, there was a river or stream, and there was a house built OVER the river. I remember that, because I wondered what the owner did about all the damp, and if the house ever molded. It may have been built of glass. An old man lived there, the creepy, crotchety old kind. Evil. I want to say he seemed harmless at first, so the boy kept visiting him, or at least came back after the first time, to see the man and his automatons (also the first time I saw the word "automaton", and I argued with myself how to pronounce it properly). Then, after a few visits, the man shut the boy up in the house and sicced the automatons on the boy, like some sort of sick experiment. I think it must have been historical, and I think it might very well have been published two or three decades before, if not longer.

And while I doubt it helps, I borrowed the book from the Marshfield, MO Elementary School library (upper-elementary, if they separated it--can't recall).

Edward Eager wrote a few books featuring children having magical and time traveling adventures. "Half Magic" was the first and best, and "A Thyme Garden" a so-so sequel featuring only time traveling adventures. Maybe that was the book /series you were thinking of?

A WRINKLE IN TIME is still one of my favorites. I have like three versions of it, different covers, all dog-eared with cracked spines. Loved MANY WATERS, too, and THE ARM OF THE STARFISH, which featured Meg and Calvin as adults. Goooood books :)

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